As part of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, the CDC was tasked with identifying promising practices to prevent sexual violence on college and university campuses. In collaboration with the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence against Women, Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) Office, and the Department of Education this tool offers an overview of how to approach sexual violence prevention on college campuses with real-world examples from the field.

As Virginia’s leading voice on sexual and domestic violence, the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance believes all college students have the right to learn and live in an educational environment where they are safe and treated equally. This is the overarching spirit of Title IX, the Clery Act, and Virginia campus safety legislation. The presence of sexual violence, dating/domestic violence, stalking, and other gender-based violence threatens this right. We also know that institutional and societal oppressions compound the negative effects of violence on students of color and other historically marginalized groups. We have heard from Virginia’s colleges and universities that you/they are hungry for concrete guidelines and examples of promising and best practices in Virginia and nationwide; to respond to this gap in resources, we researched and wrote a set of best practices guides for Virginia’s college and university campuses.

What makes these guides different from the other best practices guides for campuses?

The Safety and Justice for All guides outline best-practice recommendations to help campus professionals move beyond regulatory compliance and to institute trauma-informed and racial justice oriented prevention and responses to gender-based violence.

Recommendations are based on specific roles on campus

Key recommendations included in the guides are organized into six groups:

administrators;

advocates (both on- and off-campus);

faculty and other instructional employees;

Title IX coordinators and campus disciplinary professionals;

campus law enforcement and security officers; and

prevention specialists.

We created an edition specifically for Community Colleges

Due to the unique context of Virginia’s Community Colleges, we created a separate guide for those institutions. The structure and framework for the Community College guide are the same; several recommendations in this guide were adapted to address Community College specific concerns and utilize Community College examples.

Virginia’s colleges, universities, and community colleges are doing excellent work to respond to and prevent gender-based violence. These guides feature concrete examples of ways that institutions and organizations have implemented these recommendations, with the majority of the examples coming from Virginia institutions.

The National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) seeks feedback from the 60 state and territory sexual assault coalitions and 55 Rape Prevention Education grantees at the state and territory departments of health on prevention priorities in the biannual Priority Poll. Here are this year's results.

This research translation provides a summary of key findings on sexual violence as a component of interpersonal violence that is the wider focus of the Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014. People working to end sexual violence can use these findings to inform data collection, prevention planning and evaluation, policy advocacy, and community partnerships.

The Spring/Summer 2016 edition of The Resource highlights culture in a number of ways:

Director’s Viewpoint: Karen Baker, NSVRC Director, discusses how changes in the culture surrounding sexual violence have been prominent this year, from the Oscars to the White House.

Evaluation is for everyone: Multicultural Efforts to end Sexual Assault (MESA) shares their culturally relevant evaluation process, from building a framework to implementing strategies in the community.

West Virginia’s online academy provides needed resources: West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information and Services (WVFRIS) developed an online training academy for service providers.

Community Integrity Program uses evidence-based practices: Princeton University’s Community Integrity Program is a secondary prevention program that holds individuals who offend accountable.

For some patients, there is a correlation between sexual trauma and disordered eating: Pennsylvania Physician General Dr. Rachel Levine shares the connections between sexual trauma and eating disorders.

This issue also includes a look back at this year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a spotlight on the Hawaii Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s Community Action Teams, and several milestones for NSVRC.

Do you have an idea for a future story? Send your ideas to resources@nsvrc.org with the subject line “Resource Story Idea.”

NSVRC's xCHANGE Forum summer series is an opportunity for those working to end sexual violence to exchange information and explore new research. Through live discussion researchers, advocates, and practitioners can connect to better understand current research, best practices, and emerging needs.

Developing and supporting healthy relationships is critical to preventing sexual violence. This infographic, developed in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presents 5 keys of healthy relationships. Read more about healthy relationships.

A technical package is a collection of strategies that represent the best available evidence to prevent or reduce public health problems like violence. They can help improve the health and well-being of communities. A technical package has three parts.

The strategy lays out the direction or actions to achieve the goal of preventing violence.

The approach includes the specific ways to advance the strategy. This can be accomplished through programs, policies, and practices.

The evidence for each of the approaches in preventing violence or its associated risk factors is included as the third component.

A technical package is a collection of strategies that represent the best available evidence to prevent or reduce public health problems like violence. They can help improve the health and well-being of communities. A technical package has three parts.

The strategy lays out the direction or actions to achieve the goal of preventing violence.

The approach includes the specific ways to advance the strategy. This can be accomplished through programs, policies, and practices.

The evidence for each of the approaches in preventing violence or its associated risk factors is included as the third component.

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This site is supported by Grant/ Cooperative Agreement No. 1UF2CE002359-04 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.